2019 Goals and Wealth Rant

It’s April, obviously 2019 goal setting time!

Apparently my year runs from April to March instead of January to December. My 2018 Goals post was published in March and this year it’s even a bit later. Well actually, if I’m being totally honest, these goals were set in December but I’ve been procrastinating posting them out of fear; the fear of judgement. Our primary goal this year was going to be to invest a big chunk of our income and invest the bulk of our over-funded nest egg down to a reasonable emergency fund (due to financial insecurities I tend to want to keep money in our bank accounts instead of moving it to investments where it would be subject to more risk).

Initially, I didn’t realize I was procrastinating due to this emotional vulnerability. Throughout this blogging journey, I’ve shared more and more of our financial details and I have gotten to the point where I’m not sure if I want to share the last few details (particularly our incomes and net worth). Growing up, my family didn’t have many nice things to say about wealthy people. The general consensus was that rich people are greedy snobs that tend to also be assholes. While I don’t believe that is true, it’s still hard to risk being ostracized by family, friends and community for being different and choosing a different path.

I believe, and hope you also believe, that money is just an amplifier. It just allows us to do more of the things we would already be doing. I believe that a poor person who is a greedy, snobby, asshole would become a wealthy, greedy, snobby asshole and a generous, non-judgemental, kind, poor person would become a generous, non-judgemental, kind, wealthy person.

I’m also not saying that I am a generous, kind person (I’m definitely not the warmest, most generous, or kindest person in the world) but I’m doing the best I can, just like everyone else, to find balance between not experiencing the constant stress of poverty and not becoming an asshat.

I just have to pause for a second to point out the irony here. I once poured Great Value (Walmart) ketchup into a Heinz bottle, you know, so I looked more well off than I was, and now I’m worried about people knowing we are not poor or even middle class anymore. And while we aren’t even close to being in the top 1%, just having money to invest makes us not average. I guess it goes to show that it doesn’t matter where you are financially, it’s always weird to talk about money. Finance tends to expose our deepest insecurities, doesn’t it? I wish someone would just tell me: What’s the right amount of money to have?

I shouldn’t complain, I’m grateful for our financial position and I’m glad that I overshot my #1 life goal of “not being poor”, but the down side is that it makes me feel like I don’t fit in. There’s also some disappointment here because I thought that if I could get out of poverty, my fear of financial judgement would go away; but it didn’t, it’s just different now.

All this was just to say that I’m not going to share the dollar amount of what we plan to invest this year but I will share our spending and I’ll work on building up the courage to not care about judgement for future years.

My 2019 Financial Goals:

Goal #1   Keep spending at $40,000 for the year (not including tax) and invest the rest.

I certainly talked about this goal plenty above, but the revised goal is to stick to the 2019 Budget we created which limits our after-tax spending to $40,000 and invest the rest. We have been spending less than $40,000 per year so I expect that we will continue this trend.

Here’s our spending history:

• 2017 Actual Spending: $38,952
• 2018 Actual Spending: $38,798
• 2019 Budgeted spending: $40,000

We are expecting higher income this year since in 2018 Mr. FinanceRox had a month off after graduating (when we took our Asia trip) and then one month of reduced income because he was finishing up a project that he started in school that paid less than his current salary. We plan to invest this “extra” income instead of increasing our spending.

Goal #2   Increase “no spend” days from 70 to 100.  I’ve never tracked this before but I’d like to decrease our number of spending days to help keep to the budget we set in Goal #1. After exporting our Mint.com data for 2018, I calculated that there were 70 days where we spent $0 so I used that for the starting point for this goal.

Goal #3   Increase coaching hours from 100 to 150. Last year I started doing financial coaching locally to try to help others reduce their financial stress and find joy and confidence in their finances. This has been really rewarding so I’d like to increase the amount of time I am available for coaching. Some of these hours will come from the non-profit that I volunteer with and some of the hours will be either paid or free hours that I provide personally.

Goal #4   Complete one financial challenge each month.  I’ve been hooked on financial challenges since my very first “no spend week”. I’m very competitive so making it a challenge to do things to improve our finances just makes saving so much more fun and engaging for me. They are a great way to save $$$ and are just a great way to reset my mindset around money. I have been sharing the challenges I’ve been doing on my Facebook and Instagram pages @FinanceRox if you are interested in following along.

Goal #5   Create a YouTube channel for FinanceRox.  Most of the financial information that I consume is on YouTube. I want to provide content in a format that you all will like so I want to explore video as a medium for this content.

Goal #6   Make an extra $13,001 to remain the primary household wage earner.  This goal is a carry-forward from last year. My husband is basically a genius who is 3 years older than me and has a higher degree than I do, which are some of the legitimate reasons that he is paid more than I am. We have combined finances so it doesn’t really matter who made which dollars but I find it motivating to try to win the title of “household breadwinner”!

Goal #7   Continue weekly household financial meetings and monthly net worth tracking.  I thought about excluding this from my Goals List but it is really important to me to keep in touch with and on top of our finances.

Goal #8   Read 12 personal finance books. I know, this isn’t an impressive number of books to read (some people read like 12 books each month) but I’m a slow reader so this is a pretty aggressive goal for me

Non-Financial Goals. Although I won’t be tracking progress on FinanceRox for my non-financial goals, I thought I’d still share them in case you are interested!

• Write and perform a 5 minute stand up comedy routine. This has been a bucket list item for me for quite some time so I’m excited to give this a go in 2019. I plan to just do an open mic night locally.
• Learn how to handstand walk. One of my 2018 goals was to learn how to do a handstand so in 2019 I want to get into handstand walking.
• Monthly memorable moments. I started doing this in 2018 as well and want to continue planning meaningful monthly experiences.
• 24 hikes. We are hoping to go on a family trip to the Grand Canyon with the in-laws for an overnight hiking trip and I’d like to be in decent hiking shape.
• Learn some SQL. I’ve enjoyed learning formulas and macros in Excel so I want to learn more about SQL. This would also be helpful for me at work.
• Buy a truck camper. Looking for an excuse to keep your farm truck from several years ago even though you are suburbanites now? Consider buying a truck camper! We’d like to buy a used pop up camper and do more camping and domestic traveling in the coming years.
• Continue decluttering our house and improving tidiness. I struggle with keeping a clean house and always have. I’ve made some really good progress in the last few years (mostly thanks to Marie Kondo and the Clutter Fairy on YouTube) so I want to continue to work towards everything having a home and not piling things on the floor (particularly paperwork and laundry).

What I’m not doing in 2019. You might have noticed that I tend to set a lot of goals. Since I have a habit of overwhelming myself, I’m making an active effort to say “No” to more things so that I can focus on what is more important to me each year. So here are some of the things that I won’t be doing in 2019:

• Learning to beatbox
• Setting up a Pinterest account for FinanceRox
• Buying a family cabin
• Buying race registrations (instead of road races, I’ll be hiking)
• Tahiti trip
• Skiing
• Weekly grocery shopping (Mr. FinanceRox has taken this one for me)

Since it is April, it feels weird to say “Happy new year” so I’ll just say: Happy Year!